China-Africa can usher in AI media revolution

Time for Africa to take tech leapfrog

For much of the past century, the global film industry has been governed by a simple fact: making movies is expensive. Money, talent, technology and distribution have created formidable barriers to entry, allowing only a few Western countries to dominate the industry and shape the narratives that reach global audiences.

AI is beginning to change that equation. For developing countries, it offers something more important than a cheaper way to make films: the chance to bypass an entire industrial model rather than spend decades trying to catch up with it.

There are three propositions to consider. First, AI is breaking down the century-old barriers of the traditional film industry. Second, China has already demonstrated on an industrial scale that AI-generated content can dramatically reduce production costs while accelerating the process. Third, Africa might be uniquely positioned to seize this opportunity, precisely because it is not constrained by the legacy of a mature film industry.

Why have latecomers struggled to compete with Hollywood and other established film industries? The answer lies in four barriers: capital, talent, distribution and industrial infrastructure.

A successful feature film or television series is the result of decades of accumulated expertise, huge financial investment, specialized teams and cross-border distribution networks. Established film powers have spent generations building these systems. For newcomers, replicating them from scratch is costly, time-consuming and, ultimately limiting.

AI changes the starting point. A conventional blockbuster such as Avengers: Endgame required hundreds of people and months of work on visual effects. By contrast, comparable AI-generated material can now be produced by a single creator in roughly an hour, at a computing cost of less than 1,000 yuan ($149), based on the experience of Chinese creators. The significance is not merely that one film can be made more cheaply, but that an entire layer of industrial accumulation can be bypassed.

China's emerging AI film industry offers a glimpse of what that could look like. Production can now be managed through an end-to-end AIGC workflow, covering everything from scripts and storyboards to visual assets, video, music and distribution. This means smaller teams, shorter production cycles and much lower costs. A core team of three to five people can produce a 120-minute AI drama within three days at a computing cost of less than 30,000 yuan. A similar live-action production would typically require months, dozens of professionals and hundreds of thousands — or even millions — of yuan.

Nor is AI limited to short dramas. It is already being applied to films, animation, special effects, advertising, promotional videos and digital characters. In other words, AI is not simply making conventional productions more efficient. It is expanding what can be produced by creators who previously lacked the resources to enter the industry.

This is where Africa may have an unexpected advantage. Africa's greatest asset is cultural abundance: its languages, histories, traditions, landscapes and diverse societies. Global audiences may be increasingly familiar with standardized Hollywood formulas, but stories rooted in the African experience remain dramatically underrepresented on the world stage. For decades, production constraints limited the reach of those stories. AI could remove that constraint.

The technology is highly adaptable. Characters, settings and visual styles can be localized rapidly, allowing established production workflows to be combined with African stories, aesthetics and cultural references. The result could be something more significant than cheaper filmmaking: the creation of a new global content ecosystem in which African creators are not merely consumers of other people's stories, but producers of their own.

For a century, much of the world's cinematic influence has been concentrated in a handful of countries. The opportunity created by AI is not to run faster on the old track, but to build a new one.

That is the real meaning of technological leapfrogging — and Africa has every reason to believe it can be among the leaders of the new race.

Yang Hanhan is the director of the AI-generated short drama "Huo Qubing".

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

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